Android’s open system is both its greatest asset and its biggest curse, as Motorola has discovered. In a webcast presentation last week, Motorola CEO of Mobility Sanjay Jha said that 70 per cent of Moto handset returns were due to Android applications affecting handset performance.
Because there’s no quality assurance on the Android Marketplace, inefficient apps that drain the phone’s battery and resources – even when not active – are commonplace. This obviously impacts handset performance.
The good news for Moto uses is that the manufacturer is trying to address these rogue apps by using Motoblur to keep tabs of what apps are draining the battery and phone power. It shouldn’t be too long, Jha claims, before Motoblur can inform you if you are about to install an app that will suck away your battery life.
But hopefully even that will just be a stop-gap measure before Google actually decides to tidy up the marketplace…
Nick
Monday, June 6, 2011 at 1:02 PMI find that Motorola phones are worse at managing apps and ram than other manufacturers. I have used an SGS, Desire and SGS2. All run perfectly fine. The Defy on the other hand would constantly get to 30mb free ram and bog down something shocking.
Nigel P
Monday, June 6, 2011 at 1:13 PMNot sure if its like this with the defy, but with the milestone 2 its not the actual ram that caused the slowdowns, but the SD card. Found this out when I played with the SD card cache settings (yes you need to be rooted). Havent had a speed issue at all since doing it.
Nigel P
Monday, June 6, 2011 at 1:06 PMLets all say it together “Task Killers”.
The ones I love are the battery managers that end up using all of your battery. The wierd thing is Android already has a battery usage listing for apps (at least in 2.2), its under the settings “Battery Manager”. If an app uses enough battery it will appear (Refraction lite is in there for me right now!) Again something motorola does not need to have a skin for (come on do we need these awful skins).
Mykro
Monday, June 6, 2011 at 1:55 PMHopefully this means that Motoblur will remove itself from memory! Motorola, take a good hard look at the Nexus S. Only a single core 1Ghz but it runs Android 2.3.4 like a dream, no need for task managers because the cache & paging smarts is baked into the OS. Maybe if you updated your phones to the latest Android version and got rid of or fixed your own software, your customers would be happy with your phones.
Daniel Juhn
Monday, June 6, 2011 at 2:09 PMBefore you take the piss out of motorola, remember that if you are a gizmodo reader, chances are you are a power user, not stupid enough to install a multitude of apps that will suck performance. The rest of the world is not like us.
smackywolf
Monday, June 6, 2011 at 2:29 PMWhat they neglect to mention is that the reason most people return Moto handsets is because of Motorola’s OWN application, MotoBLUR… It’s slow as hell, and painful to use. My MS2 is only usable because I force removed MotoDURR.
Aus
Monday, June 6, 2011 at 7:57 PMMotorola is never good with battery performance
Aus
Monday, June 6, 2011 at 8:01 PMMoto guys, do not put the fault with somebody else’s. try to accept the issues and get them fixed.